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2 Responses

It's a bit of a grey area, that's for sure. There's evidence to suggest that it works, but you'd often be taking a shot in the dark.

There's a whole number of things to consider: has the domain been dropped, has it had a penalty, has it got a number of low quality, spam links? A few of these things you can get some idea of before any purchase, but with other factors you're taking a stab in the dark. That's not something I want to do with my SEO - I want control and accountability.

You also need to ask yourself how exactly is this building your brand. Buying domains and redirecting them is a classic case of chasing the algorithm; optimising for a search engine and not a user. Again, it's not the sort of practice I'd want to engage in, regardless of whatever benefit it might provide. Besides, if your website ever falls under manual review and a Google employee sees 100s of domains redirected to your site from a whole host of unrelated industries, I can tell you that it's not going to look good for your website.

As long as the domains are somewhat related and as long as you are not redirecting hundreds and thousands of them, you are safe. It is quite common practice. For say, if you have a domain like this – http://www.example.com , you can always buy the following domains - http://www.example.org , http://www.example.net , http://www.example.me etc. However, if you are buying domains which are thinly related to your website and then getting then redirected after building tons of links to then, it could be a trouble for your website in the long run.

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